Jehangir Pocha, the Indian essayist, wrote about
Hindu extremism for the Fall 2002 issue of NPQ.

Cambridge, Mass. - After Lana Makhanik,
a yuppie Russian immigrant to the United States, saw Monsoon Wedding,
the "Bolly-Holly" romantic comedy about a rambunctious New Delhi
family, she came out ecstatic.

"The color, the vibrancy, the joy and fun of it
all!" she gushed, "It makes me want to be Indian!"

Across the world, millions of people are reveling in
the burst of creativity coming from India and Asia's other cultural
giant, China. As China and India have rejected the grim socialism of their
past and opened up their minds, borders and markets, a new generation
of artists from these countries have been taking Chinese and Indian pop
and fine culture to new levels of sophistication. They are expressing
and explaining their experience to the world on their own terms, and an
America redefining itself as a multicultural nation within a globalized
world is soaking it up.

Bollywood musicals are dazzling US audiences and playing
to packed houses across the country. China's Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon has become the highest grossing non-English film of all time. On
the street in many an American city, teenage girls have taken to wearing
a Hindu-style "dot" between their eyes, and boys to tattooing
themselves with Chinese characters they cannot read.

In more rarified circles, Chinese and Indian artists
are winning acclamation at the highest levels. In 2000, the Paris-based
Chinese novelist Gao Xingjian claimed China's first Nobel Prize
in literature. In 2001, the award went to a member of the Indian diaspora,
V.S. Naipaul. And a Bollywood film, Lagaan, became the first Indian film
nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar since 1957.

Even as culture czars and consumers celebrate India's
and China's dramatic reentry into the popular imagination, they
are unwittingly driving another dynamic.

Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard University's John F.
Kennedy School of Government, calls it "soft power" - the
influence and attractiveness a nation acquires when others are drawn to
its culture and ideas. Nye, who developed the concept, says soft power
enables a nation "to achieve desired outcomes in international affairs
through attraction rather than coercion."

Until recently, soft power was largely an American weapon.
Washington had learned to wield its soft power as astutely as its "hard,"
or military and financial, might. Adherents of Nye's theory believe
the Cold War was won as much by Radio Free Europe, Motown and Hollywood
as it was by President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program.

As emblems of America, Mickey Mouse, McDonald's
and Levi's presented to the world a nation that was easy to love.
To many, these brands became symbols of the universal ideals of America - free
markets and free people - and made people all over the world want
to follow and be like Americans, even if their leaders told them differently.

A Chinese dissident once told me that when she was forced
to listen to local Communist Party leaders rage about America, she would
hum Bob Dylan tunes in her head as her own silent revolution against them.

But now India and China are acquiring soft power and
turning the tables. Even as Sen. Henry Hyde bashes China on C-SPAN, Americans
are tuning in three channels away to watch Jackie Chan take on a bunch
of international racketeers, including shady Americans. In such films
and in other media, the images of Chinese and Indians, and more generally
of China and India, are increasingly becoming more positive.

For decades, any mention of India or China conjured
up images of under-clothed, underfed and over-populated nations preaching
a combination of socialist dogma and political revolution. To a Western
world in the throes of post-war consumerism, they seemed hopelessly disconnected.
Of course, in the heady '60s both India and China enjoyed ascendancy
in the cultural imagination, but it was brief. Within a few years, Nehru
jackets and the Little Red Book were soon passé. As John Lennon,
himself once enamored and soon disillusioned with Asia's many ambiguities,
sang "if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you're
not going to make it with anyone anyhow."

The reason for India and China's cultural regression
was that their Socialist utopias, which were aimed at offering the world
an alternative to American capitalism, failed. The ensuing political turmoil
and economic stagnation - the Maoist years in China and Indira Gandhi's
authoritarian rule in India - caused a creative drought. Censorship
and imposed notions of culture suffocated domestic creative impulses.

The liberalization and reform of the 1980s and 1990s
changed all that.

The creativity of India's and China's new
artists has been so powerful that apart from attracting audiences to Indian
and Chinese cultural products, they have begun to shape and influence
aspects of America's own culture.

Albums such as Nitin Sawhney's Beyond Skin have
inspired rock bands to interlace their searing guitar riffs with raunchy
Indian melodies. Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest production Bombay
Dreams, a celebration of Bollywood music, just opened to raves and sold-out
performances. The directors M. Night Shyamalan, Shekhar Kapur and John
Woo are conjuring celluloid charisma by marrying their indigenous instincts
with Hollywood style. At society balls the glamour set are arriving packaged
in a new élan that combines Indian and Chinese designs with American
classics, while gourmands are savoring the cuisines of these once remote
countries.

Lu Ann Walthers, a senior editor at Pantheon Books that
publishes Chinese and Indian authors including Ha Jin and Meera Nair,
says America's captivation with Indian and Chinese culture is a
natural corollary to living in a globalizing world.

"In the past, one could read excellent American
books and never get any picture of the outside world," Walthers
says. Now, she says, "the outside world is thrust into America's
consciousness (and) Americans are puzzled by its complexities and reaching
for works that help explain it."

Meera Nair, whose collection of short stories is called
Video, says she intended her book to be "an exploration of what
happens when the West intrudes into the East."

"But what I have come to realize is that when Americans
read a book written by an Indian about how Indians see America, it changes
their view of both cultures," says Nair. "So a book about
the intrusion of American culture into India itself becomes an intrusion
of Indian culture into America."

Nair sees this interplay as the essential alchemy of
culture - that an impulse from the West may influence the East, and
an interpretation of this influence could travel back to the West. "In
the end," says Nair, "ideally both cultures are transformed,
for they have achieved some greater understanding of the other."

Artistically, this is heady stuff. Even before the mantra
of globalization, art and culture had always sought to achieve a universalism
of expression. One might expect nations to cheer this cultural mingling
of waters. But politically, the burst in India and China's soft
power is entangled with some powerful geopolitical undercurrents.

In this media age, the power of image is of growing significance
in international politics. "We live in an information world and
information depends on its credibility," Nye says. "Countries
that are more credible are more likely to be believed and then followed."

Britain, Israel and Taiwan have long understood the value
of cultivating a positive image, not just with US decision makers in Congress,
but also with ordinary Americans. A positive public image not only brings
tourists and trade, it is also critical in shaping American public opinion
on international disputes. During the 1982 Falklands conflict between
Argentina and Britain, for example, the deep affection many Americans
felt for Britain was undoubtedly part of the reason Washington "tilted"
toward its Atlantic cousin while staying officially neutral.

The Indian government, especially since the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 1998, has been quick to
see the importance to building its image in the US, and it recognizes
the appeal of its movies and culture as a persuasive way of achieving
this.

As part of India's push to promote its cultural
exports into the US and beyond, New Delhi supports India's participation
in US film festivals, at the Academy Awards and in international beauty
contests. It gives generous tax breaks to the Indian entertainment industry
to promote exports and consular officials have been instructed to work
hard toward promoting Bollywood in their host countries.

The most vivid illustration of India's efforts
to use soft power as a tool of foreign policy came recently in Afghanistan.
When the Taliban fell in Afghanistan, Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant
Singh was one of the first dignitaries to ?y into Kabul and welcome the
interim Karzai government. Unlike other visitors, Singh, who was eager
for India to replace Pakistan as the neighbor of influence, packed his
plane not with supplies of food, medicines or arms, but with tapes of
Bollywood movies and music that were quickly distributed across the city.

New Delhi's objective is clear - to influence
other nations, particularly America, with a view to winning friendship,
investment and political support in its rivalry with Pakistan. On a recent
visit to the US, B.K. Agnihotri, a senior BJP leader, exhorted Indians
in America to "train in propaganda" and hosted a series of
workshops to coach Indians in "educating US media" on such
issues as the conflict in Kashmir.

China has been less savvy in understanding and using
its growing soft power in the US, but its intention to manage its image
through the media is no less certain. Ironically, much of the soft power
that could accrue to China through the novels and films Chinese artists
produce is diluted by the government's attempts to squelch works
it sees as subversive. While Beijing, like New Delhi, promotes the export
of selected films, it also heavily censors its own filmmakers and imposes
tight restrictions on the import of US films into China.

Besides cultural influences, Nye says, a substantial
dimension of China's attractiveness and soft power comes from its
economic success. This, he says, has won the grudging respect of the West,
and has caused developing nations to want to emulate China.

Maintaining this economic success story has been critical
for the Chinese government, both to retain its credibility and to attract
more foreign investment. Each year, it posts official economic growth
rates of 7 or 8 percent - figures that many international economists
look at with great skepticism, given that China has entered the most difficult
stage of overhauling its moribund state sector and that hundreds of millions
of Chinese are now unemployed or underemployed. Still, the Chinese government's
message to the outside world is that China is in a dynamic stage of growth,
confidently expanding its economy and taking its rightful place among
the world's economic players and top powers.

Toward that end, China has welcomed the visibility that
has come with hosting such events in the 1990s as the Asian Games and
the UN International Women's Conference. In this new century, many
Chinese are overjoyed at the fact that Beijing will host the 2008 Olympics - a
chance to show the world what China can do. A flurry of construction and
renovation projects has already begun, and several of the worst polluting
factories in Beijing have been ordered to clean up or shut down.

Even as China and India use soft power, successfully,
to improve their international image, front pages have been carrying a
different kind of story.

China's exports of weapons and technology to Saudi
Arabia, North Korea, Pakistan and Iran, its aggression toward Taiwan and
its crackdown on dissidents has troubled Washington and much of the world
community. India's slide into Hindu religious fundamentalism and
its accompanying belligerence toward Kashmiris and Pakistan has brought
the subcontinent to the brink of nuclear war four times in the last four
years.

US and world response to these actions has been muted.
Some analysts say that India's and China's rising soft power
in the US has limited the options Washington can use against them, complicating
Washington's already delicate relationship with both countries.

"When a country gets very popular with the American
public it gets somewhat harder for Washington to follow a hard line against
them," says Nye.

For example, in the dispute over Kashmir, increasing
numbers of Americans seem to be taking a more indulgent view of an India
they have come to understand much better than its Islamic counterpart,
Pakistan.

Increasingly, the astute use of popular media and public
events by governments is eroding the fine line that used to separate propaganda
and soft power. While this is nothing new - Hitler used the Olympics
to showcase a new Germany in 1933 and the Allies made imaginative propaganda
use of films like Casablanca - artists and writers such as Ha Jin
say the process of using art for politics is "a kind of violation."
But other Chinese and Indian artists are, increasingly, supporting the
direct state actions New Delhi and Beijing are taking to build their soft
power.

The perceived "cultural hegemony" of America
has rankled many such Chinese and Indians. Eileen Chow, an associate professor
of Asian studies at Harvard University, says there is "an unabashed
nationalism" in China and India, and a tendency to see America as
the mean street bully trying to keep them down. Many Indian and Chinese
artists feel that the US media has neglected them and portrayed their
nations inaccurately. Many of them, with their new sense of empowerment,
are determined to combat this. In China, Chow says, there is growing desire
among artists for their nation to recapture its previous positions of
eminence in the world and an appreciation of what it means to be Chinese.

"Nationalist sentiment is mined in China, because
the party is totally bankrupt intellectually," Chow says. "By
getting people excited about China, young people feel very proud of their
culture and their politics."

Indians, too, yearn for greater recognition and respect
for their ancient culture, and for a more influential place in the modern
world. Like the Chinese, they celebrate any sign that this is happening.
When the Indian film Lagaan won its Oscar nomination, the jubilant reaction
in the media, among politicians and on the street was similar to that
after India tested its nuclear weapons - a celebration that India
had shown the world just what it could do.

The massive Chinese and Indian expatriate communities
in the US - 2.4 million and 1.7 million respectively - also play
a critical role in promoting the political interests and culture of their
home countries. Both have powerful lobbies in Washington. The Indian community,
which is now America's richest ethnic minority, has become particularly
effective in influencing US policy toward South Asia, and the soft power
gained from ever-increasing American interest in Indian ?lm and literature
has boosted their efforts.

"If you look at places like New Jersey and New
York City, you are seeing that more Indian Americans are getting involved
in politics," said Parag Khandhar, a policy associate at the Asian-American
Federation Census Information Centre. Many US-based affiliates of the
Hindu nationalist parties that currently rule India have also tried to
infiltrate the US public school system, offering to make seemingly benign
"cultural presentations" to students, says Vijay Prashad,
director of International Studies at Trinity College in Connecticut. In
reality, Prashad says, the presentations are far from accurate or fair.
They are instead, he says, designed to spread the Hindu nationalist view
of India and India-Pakistan relations.

Washington is disconcerted by such initiatives, and
by the increasing dilution of its own soft power. Calls are being made
from all ends of the political spectrum to rebuild the United States Information
Service (USIS) and increase funding to such public diplomacy initiatives
as VOA. A report by the Center for the Study of the Presidency, an influential
think tank, cautions against the growing media power being acquired by
other nations. It warns that "some of the information revolution's
benefits have been turned against (America)." The US, it says, needs
a "new public communications strategy to preempt...rising anti-American
sentiments and negative perceptions."

Though such concerns are focused around the Middle East
where such Islamic information services as the Al Jazeera cable network
are transmitting a very different reality of the world to its audiences,
India's and China's increasing efforts to wield their own
soft power have not gone unnoticed in Washington.

Adm. Bill Owens, the former vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, says the US must "rebuild (its) capabilities to
speak to the world about America and what it truly represents."
Owens says the growth in foreign media "threatens America's
fundamental interests. Negative perceptions are often a diffuse threat,
but over time, such perceptions can erode our power abroad."

President Bush appears to believe that soft power can
indeed play a vital role in projecting and protecting American power.
The president has promised to consider restructuring and refunding the
US public diplomacy machine, and he recently appointed a former advertising
executive, Charlotte Beers, as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.
Beers gained fame on Madison Avenue for sharply increasing the sales of
Uncle Ben's rice. One of her first actions in her new position has
been to launch a new radio station for the Middle East, called Radio Sawa,
or Radio Together. Beers has said she hopes the station will help change
the political climate in the region, offering Middle Eastern youth an
endless stream of Britney Spears and other pop music recordings, interspersed
with carefully edited news bulletins. While there has been plenty of criticism
of Radio Sawa, local journalists and diplomats confirm that it is fast
becoming ubiquitous.

As the world transitions from an era of old-fashioned
brute power into an information age, the added emphasis on soft power
is natural. Just as China and India acquired their own nuclear weapons
as a way of standing up to US dominance in what was and still remains
the chief determinant of strategic power in the last century, both nations
are now moving to claim their own positions in the US-dominated domain
of soft power.

The repercussions of India and China exploding into the
American cultural imagination could be as significant as the explosions
that blasted them into the nuclear club, although they will play out more
subtly and over a longer period of time. Though neither India nor China
can really challenge the US, their rapid attainment of strong positions
in both areas is leading the US to shore up its own position in both fields.
While Washington plans to safeguard its nuclear omnipotence with the controversial
Missile Defense Initiative, it is also moving quietly to strengthen its
soft power.

US trade negotiators have turned up the heat on China
to allow the import of more American movies. India's resistance to opening
its media and publishing industry to foreign investors is also slowly
being worn down by US pressure. Meanwhile, the US has created legal and
invisible barriers to foreign media seeking entry into the US.

Like consumer marketers competing for a slice of public
mindshare, Washington, Beijing and New Delhi are increasingly trying to
win hearts and minds. Superficially, this may not seem an altogether bad
thing. The battle for minds may be insidious, but at least it is not gory.
Yet, as the US founding fathers warned, the good judgment of citizens
is essential to their freedoms. As public perceptions are increasingly
manipulated, there is a risk of misjudging what is actual and what is
artifice, making citizens less vigilant and less aware of how politics
are actually playing out on the global stage.